Google Issues Lame Response to Android SDK Gaffe

Google erred on the conservative side by offering its new Android SDK to only the 50 winners of the Android Developer Challenge. My guess is that Google's Android mission will now be full disclosure of the SDK and its overall open-source development practice.

Google made a critical faux pas July 14 when it sent out a new Android
software development kit to only the 50 winners of the Android Developer
Challenge. How very un-open source of it.

But Google might have even erred more greatly in responding to the issue, as a
spokesperson told me July 18: "The ADC
finalists are helping us test the latest version of the SDK before we release
it to the world in the coming weeks."

Er, okay. So, the entrants aren't qualified to test the SDK? Is that okay with
programmers working feverishly on Android application development? I shouldn't
think so.

Here on a Google Android Group thread is the SDK 84853 e-mail,
which was sent to all ADC entrants-and not
just the finalists-by mistake, according to Android Developer Advocate David
McLaughlin.

As Geek.com noted, "Fifty developers have access to it
while everyone else is left using the last version released in March this year."

Indeed, the move sparked angry outcries from left-out Android programmers, some
of whom threatened to move over to write applications for the iPhone. Wrote
programmer Shane Isbell:

Sadly, if Google said they were to
release the SDK tomorrow, I just wouldn't care anymore. Google is closed;
Google is the status quo in mobile; Google is not really even a leader anymore,
they are following Apple. What's really changed? Another mobile platform? More
fragmented market? The carriers get a free operating system built on the hard
work of the open-source community.

The gaffe couldn't come at a worse time for Android, which Google hopes to make
the de facto mobile operating system as it seeks to grab more mind share and
market share for mobile Web applications.

Yet Apple is cruising, selling millions of iPhones. Apple's iPhone 3G launched July 11 to great fanfare and hundreds of
new native and Web mobile apps.

There won't even be an Android-based phone until late in 2008, and if the
company keeps treating its programmers this way, there won't be an Android
phone at all until next year. How far along will the iPhone be then?

To be fair, the Google spokesperson hadn't spoken to Google Android chief Andy
Rubin about how to respond to this yet, but the spokesperson said she was
trying "to get more information and answer some of the questions that are
coming up."

Is it too late? What can, or will, Google do to assuage programmers' pains? In
short, give them the darn SDK.

I asked Enderle Group's Rob Enderle if this move was just bad for public
relations, or also a symptom of a larger gulf of understanding between Google's
Android developer advocates and the programmers. Here's his take:

A bit of both. Google isn't yet used
to working with developers and seems to be using the braille method (feeling
their way as they go), which typically doesn't work well. Android was hot as
the next big thing but has recently been eclipsed by the iPhone and developers
will always prefer a real market to one that doesn't yet exist. Google is at
real risk of losing most of their developers over the combination of this gaffe
and Apple both getting their solution first and getting it reasonably right.

I agree with Enderle. Google had best clean up its Android act before it loses
its act. It doesn't need to have a lot of negative energy brewing and
perception problems before Android even finds its way onto phones.
Google needs to disclose its Android development
practices in keeping with open-source tradition.